Korea crossing

I am sitting in my favourite café in Busan — the one I finally found after weeks of searching, the one that fits — and I have exactly one week left before we leave for Japan.

I just had to open my calendar to check when we arrived in South Korea. April 9th. Late, cold, dragging our luggage through unfamiliar streets into a Seoul apartment while everyone else was already asleep. That was seven weeks ago. Seven weeks that feel, in the particular way this nomadic life has of compressing time, like both forever and a single blink. So much has happened. So much has already started to blur at the edges.

Which is exactly why I am writing this. Not to analyse or conclude, but to press these weeks between pages before they fade — all the things that surprised me, delighted me, confused me, made me laugh, made me think. Korea in all its contradictions, observed from the outside by a woman who has been watching carefully.

K-Beauty: Centuries in a Bottle

Let me start with the thing that found me before I even landed — because I had already been researching Korean skincare for months before our arrival, filling my Coupang cart with serums and essences long before I understood the philosophy behind them.

Korea has one of the largest cosmetics industries in the world, and the K in K-beauty stands for something more than a letter. Behind the cheerful packaging of Olive Young and the overwhelming walls of products in every pharmacy is a tradition stretching back centuries — to the Joseon Dynasty, where women used rice water, honey, and fermented herbal remedies not to cover the skin but to tend it. The philosophy then was the same as it is now: prevention over correction. Long-term skin health over quick fixes. Not hide what is wrong but keep what is right.

What K-beauty is chasing is something called glass skin — a complexion so smooth, luminous and clear it seems to reflect light from within. Not flawless in the made-up sense, but healthy in the most fundamental one. Hydrated, even-toned, alive. It is a different beauty ideal than the one I grew up with, and I find it genuinely more interesting.

What surprised me most: this is not only a women’s industry. Korean men have elaborate skincare routines too — cleansers, toners, essences, sunscreen — and think nothing of it. Beauty here is not gendered the way it is in most of Europe. I watched men at the spa applying sheet masks with the same focused attention as the women beside them, and something about that felt quietly radical.

And yet — and this is where it gets complicated — standing in the middle of Olive Young with its forty varieties of snail mucin and its promises of poreless perfection, I kept asking myself: where is the line? Between nurturing yourself and chasing an image. Between genuine self-care and the particular anxiety of a culture that ties appearance so tightly to social worth. The products are extraordinary. The philosophy is sound. But the pressure underneath it all — the standard it is all reaching toward — that is something else entirely.

I saw it most clearly one afternoon at the spa.

The Woman at the Mirror

We took the children to a Korean spa and waterpark — a jjimjilbang, the kind of sprawling bathhouse complex that is as much a social institution as a place to wash. Entering was its own education: a series of rituals and rules that I navigated with the focused uncertainty of someone who does not want to do the wrong thing but inevitably will.

In the women’s changing room, I noticed her. A young woman, quite slight, standing at the mirror. Naked, as everyone is in that space — there is a beautiful unselfconsciousness about Korean bathhouse culture, an acceptance of bodies in their natural state that I found genuinely moving. But she was standing differently from everyone else. Still.

Looking at herself with a kind of careful, searching attention, touching her own skin slowly, turning slightly, returning to the mirror. Smiling sometimes, very softly, as if she had found something there she needed to confirm was still present.

I don’t know what she was seeing. I don’t know whether it was love or critique or something more complicated than either. But I watched her, briefly, and felt something I couldn’t name — a mixture of fascination and tenderness and something close to sadness. Because she was very thin. And she stayed there a long time.

When we returned to the changing room five hours later, she was still there.

I have thought about her since. About what it means to live in a culture where how you look carries so much weight — where glass skin and careful grooming and physical perfection are not just personal choices but social currency. Where beauty is both a centuries-old philosophy of self-care and, sometimes, a mirror you stand in front of for five hours.

The line is thin. And Korea made me feel that thinness very clearly.

The Runners, the Butter, and the Man with the Camera

Let me shift to something lighter, because Korea has also made me laugh more than almost anywhere else we have been.

The running culture here is unlike anything I have encountered in any country in the world. There are runners everywhere — morning, noon, evening, in the rain, along the beach, up the mountain trails. Hundreds of them, every day. Which, as someone who has been training seriously for Hyrox in Oslo in September, I found deeply congenial.

But Korean running is not just running. It is an aesthetic.

The outfits alone deserve their own blog post. Colour-coordinated, brand-perfect, pressed in ways that suggest the gym bag has never touched a floor. Hats. Gloves. Compression sleeves in matching tones.

And the documentation — oh, the documentation. I was three weeks into my Busan runs before I understood the man I kept seeing: jogging alongside a group of runners while carrying a large professional camera, filming them as they ran. Not a journalist. Just their designated photographer. The group’s pace adjusted around his shots.

I laughed the first time I saw it. Then I signed up for a Butter Run.

My friend Andy and I joined seventy other people for an organised run along the Busan seafront — to silent disco music, while simultaneously churning cream in small pouches until it became butter. I am not making this up. The pace was extremely relaxed. The photography stops were frequent. Everyone looked incredible. I have never felt so simultaneously ridiculous and charmed.

And the face masks. Running with full UV-protective face coverings is completely normal here — not a COVID holdover but a deliberate act of skin protection, entirely consistent with the K-beauty philosophy of prevention. The first time I saw a masked runner I did a double take. By week three I understood it completely and had started mentally pricing them.

Dogs in Prams and Falling Birth Rates

Then there are the dogs.

South Korea has one of the lowest birth rates in the world — a fact with serious demographic implications that the government is actively trying to address. In the meantime, the pram industry has found a workaround: an entirely new customer base. Because the dogs here do not walk.

They ride.

I have spent seven weeks doing a double take every time I approach a pram. By now I have developed a technique — I check for paws before assuming the occupant is human. This morning I was fully certain a twin stroller contained two small dogs and was composing my reaction accordingly, only to discover, on closer approach, a set of actual human twins sleeping peacefully inside. I was briefly disappointed before being glad.

The dogs that do ride in prams are extraordinary. Groomed to a standard I have never witnessed on an animal. Dressed, sometimes. Accessorised, occasionally. They even come in slings. The prams themselves are nicer than most children’s pushchairs I saw in Denmark. Korea treats its dogs the way it treats everything else: with an attention to appearance and quality that is, depending on your perspective, either deeply impressive or completely unhinged.

Possibly both.

The Cars, the Crossings, and the Quiet Terror of an Uber

A few final observations from seven weeks of paying attention.

The cars. South Korea has more Ferraris per square kilometre than anywhere else I have lived or visited. Our son, who previously had normal ambitions, has now decided he will own one. I consider this a reasonable outcome of seven weeks in Seoul and Busan. The Ubers, meanwhile, are driven with an enthusiasm for speed that I have come to experience as a form of extreme sport — each journey equal parts convenience and adrenaline, every lane change a small act of faith.

And then the crossings.

Pedestrian crossings in Korea are their own particular drama. You wait — ninety seconds minimum, sometimes longer — for a green light that, when it finally arrives, lasts approximately long enough to cross if you are already moving at pace. The second it switches back to red, traffic moves. Not after the remaining pedestrians have cleared. Immediately. The understanding seems to be that if you were not fast enough, that is your problem.

Every crossing feels like a small negotiation between human and physics, and I have jogged across many of them in the past seven weeks with more urgency than my training plan required.

Korea has been harder than I expected in some ways and more generous in others. It has surprised me with its beauty and its running trails and its extraordinary food and its coffee shops and Mori. It has unsettled me with its mirrors and its standards and its particular pressure to appear perfectly composed at all times.

What I keep returning to is the contradiction at the heart of it — the same contradiction that is, perhaps, at the heart of all cultures, including my own: the difference between caring for yourself and performing yourself.

Between the ancient wisdom of tending to your skin because you deserve to feel well, and the modern anxiety of standing at a mirror for five hours looking for something that might not be findable there.

I have genuinely loved being here.

I have also been grateful, every single day, to be someone who is slowly — imperfectly, incompletely, but sincerely — learning the difference.

One more week, Korea.

You have been something else entirely.